Suki AI: The Future of Healthcare Assistance
Suki is a healthcare platform and assistant that’s making waves in the industry. The platform’s assistive layer integrates seamlessly into all aspects of healthcare technology, and it’s designed to make life easier for doctors by automating tasks.
This year marks a significant shift, as enterprise AI solutions start to become more integrated into patient care. Suki’s growth has been bolstered by an investment from Zoom Ventures, the investment arm of Zoom Communications, Inc., a prominent AI healthcare collaboration platform.
Following a period of impressive expansion in 2024, Suki secured a $70 million Series D raise. This funding has propelled Suki’s partnership with Zoom, integrating AI-driven clinical notes into Zoom’s Workplace for Clinicians to improve the user experience for medical professionals. This will allow doctors to spend more focused time with their patients.
This boost will enable Suki to broaden its partnerships with health systems and electronic health records (EHR) providers, including collaborations with Epic, Oracle Cerner, MEDITECH, and Athena. The goal is to make healthcare technology more assistive, and to reduce administrative burdens on clinicians and patients.
According to Punit Soni, founder and CEO, Suki’s technology helps clinicians complete notes 72% faster and provides support for tasks such as coding and answering questions. He also says Suki delivers a nine-x ROI in its first year.
Addressing a Common Challenge in Healthcare
Soni’s vision for Suki stems from his observations of the challenges in healthcare. Before 2017, he sought investment opportunities in fields with “fixed ontologies, repeatable workflows, and sophisticated users.” He saw the potential for innovation in healthcare, noting that doctors perform many routine tasks with only minor clinical variations. This insight led to his realization that healthcare was “going to be really good” for incorporating AI and automation.
His research involved extensive observation of clinicians at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His friend, an internal medicine doctor, allowed him to witness the daily challenges and distractions faced by medical professionals during patient visits. Soni witnessed interactions where doctors grappled with writing notes while trying to maintain empathy.
He recounts an epiphany that occurred during a visit with an Army veteran. During the visit, he saw the various challenges clinicians faced and the documentation needed when treating patients with multiple challenges such as PTSD and diabetes. He noticed how a doctor was “forced to write stickie notes” and type notes while trying to maintain empathy. He realized the potential of technology to ease the burden of these professionals.
Soni emphasized that the goal of technology is to enhance society’s well-being. He also noted the importance of consulting with nurses to get feedback on ideas.
Today, the Suki suite is equipped with comprehensive medical context, speech recognition, and AI capabilities. The goal is to address what Soni calls the “epidemic of clinician burnout.”
Interoperability, Invisibility, and the Core Mission
The Suki team is comprised of experts with extensive experience in building and commercializing modern healthcare products for major companies such as Apple, Google, and IBM’s Watson. Soni’s background includes CPO of Flipkart and leadership roles at Google.
One of the biggest challenges in healthcare is the high stakes associated with medical decisions. A mistake can have serious, even life-threatening, consequences. The goal of AI tools like those created by Suki is not to make healthcare more complex but to simplify.
Suki’s focus is on making technology invisible to the patient, freeing up doctors to focus on their patients. It is a stark contrast to the trend of too much focus on EHRs rather than patient interaction.
Soni says that the goal of Suki’s products is to enable clinicians to focus on the person who is the patient, with the technology operating seamlessly in the background.
Suki Assistant in Practice
The Suki Assistant app, as described by Soni, operates as an AI assistant. It helps physicians prepare for patient visits by generating summaries. It also allows doctors to ask contextual questions, such as a patient’s A1C level or current prescriptions.
This AI assistant takes note of actions and creates notes for clinicians. It also extracts order, diagnoses, and ICD10 codes. When a clinician starts their day, Suki presents a list of patients to be seen. The doctor can then request a summary of any selected patient.
Suki consolidates the patient’s history into a couple of paragraphs. The clinician can then review the summary and have a conversation with the patient.
At the end of the visit, the clinician has a set of clinically accurate notes automatically entered into the medical record system. Soni sees this as a transformative experience: “You’re just practicing medicine—and everything else is taken care of.”
